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Jaggers Communications

Mar 04
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Building the Business: How you can Help

By Communications

My friend Jennifer asked me a great non-social media question yesterday. She said, “What can I do to help?” She’s lovely and kind and just the sort of friend we should all have. We were talking about business, specifically my new business, which I just launched in January, 2011.

Business is going well and I’m busy, but I am looking for new clients and opportunities (so often we forget to let people know that we’re eager for more or new business — wouldn’t it be terrible if everyone assumed I was too busy to take on new work?)

Jennifer was genuinely interested in the kind of business I hope to gain, so I thought I’d share my answer with the broader audience of my social network.

First, to clarify (someone called me a publicist yesterday and I openly grimaced), Jaggers Communications helps businesses and nonprofits reach their business goals through strategic marketing, content creation, public relations and social media.

Experience is concentrated serving clients in:

  • Life sciences and other science-based business
  • Clean energy
  • Health care
  • Education (institutions and products/services that support learning)
  • Travel and tourism
  • Small to medium-sized business to consumer companies

I’m so appreciative to all the community members who have already helped with referrals and endorsements. As a “connector” it give me great pleasure to connect others to opportunities as well, so don’t ever hesitate to ask.

Feb 28
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LinkedIn: When to Ignore a Request to Connect

By Communications

My friend John posed this question via Twitter, “Say you don’t know someone and they send you a LinkedIn invite. I usually summarily reject. Are there cases where I shouldn’t?”

It’s a good question, and I know that people have differing opinions on this one. There are two schools of thought, as in most things, one is “white hat” the other a more “black hat” or not-so-ethical approach. I am steadfastly white hat; that’s what you get from someone with a background in professional communications, public relations and reputation management.

That being said, I believe in preserving the sanctity of what LinkedIn has set out to do; create business networks of people who actually know one another. I will extend this to fairly loose connections and relationships — I don’t have to know you in person or have worked directly with you to connect with you on LinkedIn. I do, however, need to have context that indicates our commonality — where we met, a common group or community to which we belong. I speak to large audiences frequently and sometimes am invited to connect to someone who I met during that speaking engagement. I often accept these, if I’m given that context and made a personal connection with that person at that event.

This leads to how we send those invitations to connect with others. Several years ago I received an invitation to connect that was so well-written, I have cleaned it up, generalized it, and used it as a best practice example ever since. A good invitation to connect looks something like this:

As you may know, I resigned my position as [TITLE & COMPANY]. It was a rich experience and I value the privilege of access to a very high level of thought leadership during my years there.

Recently, I have begun to work with the [COMPANY] to [DETAILS OF JOB AND INDUSTRY] We are [MORE DETAILS OF THE WORK BEING DONE, RELATIONSHIPS BEING BUILT].

As I value our relationship and appreciate the depth of experience you bring to your profession, please join my network so we can stay in touch on this and more.

Warm regards,

It’s helpful, when you reach out to someone to connect, to give them context — the when and where of your meeting or interaction. Some of us meet and work with many people and our memories are not as clear as we’d like. I may have simply forgotten your name, and if your note says only “I’d like to add you to my network on LinkedIn” that doesn’t do anything to differentiate you from the guy who is just trying to build his numbers.

That brings me back to the concept of the black hat social networker — occasionally you will get invitations from people who are so far outside your network you can’t even figure out why the invitation has arrived. There are people simply playing a numbers game; don’t be tempted to join this tribe or contribute to it by accepting. It devalues the network and the strength of the relationships in it.

What do you think? When do you ignore a request to connect on LinkedIn?

Feb 23
Love0

How to Seduce Others into Social Media

By Social Media

I’ve been thinking a lot about how we’ve been successful at moving the social media needle in business.

It’s what Jay Baer and Amber Naslund call The Now Revolution, that tipping point at which business realized that this social phenomenon that has over taken the Internet is not going away; that it affects business, for good or for bad and ignoring it is a not only a bad business practice, but can cause your business to fail.

While I’m trying to figure out how to afford to buy a copy of Jay and Amber’s brilliant book for all my clients, I asked my readers to share some of the ways they’ve been able to create excitement around social strategy. Some of the best answers are here:

20% of New Patient Base Comes from Social Media

I’ve shared with my colleagues that as a working mom with a little one, launching a biz in a down economy in a new location…all I could manage WAS growing my biz through social media and connecting online.

I’ve had at least 20% of my new patient base come in as referrals from social media, not to mention thousands of dollars of free media exposure on the news, magazines (including a national publication), newspapers, and numerous websites….all from consistently and sincerely getting engaged in social media.

It’s cost me time and sweat equity, but the pay-off has been tremendous. Seriously…who can’t afford to get involved today? — Dr. Dolly Garnecki, Spinal Health and Wellness, http://www.scoliosisdoc.com/

Show, Don’t Tell

When we had our first meeting to discuss the fact that we really needed to be engaging with our customers via social media I really didn’t need to actually SAY much at all. I just pulled up the very active Facebook pages of our top competitors in each of our geographic areas… they were there, they were active, and it was CLEAR they were talking to OUR customers! Point made!  – Andrea Heapes, High Peak Sportswear, http://www.hipeak.com/

Networking on Steriods

In 18 months on Twitter and Facebook I’ve met, connected with, and become friends with far more people here, than I had in the previous 10 years living here without it. Social media is networking on steroids. Trying to go without it is like leading a sedentary life and expecting to remain fit. — Steve Gaines, Monticello Media http://twitter.com/SteveGaines62

These are great stories to share with clients, businesses and organizations still dragging their feet into “now.”

If your business is already engaged in social media, what was the tipping point that made you begin?

Feb 21
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The 4 Must-Do Items for Social Media Startup

By Social Media

A friend of mine (and former colleague) is a public relations consultant in another market. She, like many of us in PR, is being asked for good counsel in social media for her PR client. She sent a note, asking me for quick basics to share with the client, and to give her a framework for what the client should be doing with social media.

Here are the four absolute musts for her client to be doing with social media, and the structure with which she should be building a plan to address her client’s needs:

  1. Listening — they should be reading local bloggers and have RSS feeds set up/alerts to tell them when people are posting online, looking for key words and phrases that indicate people searching for their services — you can use Ice Rocket, Social Mention and Google Alerts to create feeds for good monitoring of the social web.
  2. Connecting — whomever represents the company online needs to expand their social network as wide and deep as possible. That means ALL contacts uploaded to LinkedIn, a new list on Facebook for business connections, with all contacts uploaded there, a Facebook page for the business and exploring Tweepz to figure out who to follow in the community.
  3. Engaging — this is what takes a lot of effort; replying to others, responding to those you’re following, in short, interaction!
  4. Publishing — sharing the stories of the customers, the company, the vendors, etc. and news releases as well (and republishing content published by others, e.g., sharing links to news clips about the business.)

This is probably the quickest, simplest answer I can give for getting started with social media.

Feb 18
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Social Media Assignment #7: Find Your LinkedIn Contacts on Twitter

By Communications

If you’ve been following the social media assignments, congratulations! You’ve made a lot of progress if you’ve knocked off each of these simple tasks.

This assignment makes a couple of assumptions. If you’re reading this blog, you most likely have a LinkedIn account and, I’m assuming that your LinkedIn profile is complete and that you have all of your contacts entered in to your business social network.  The second assumption is that you have an established Twitter account. If not, you might want to backtrack and hit this social media assignment.

Today’s Social Media Assignment

You may be making an assumption of your own; you might think that your contacts in LinkedIn aren’t using Twitter. Depending on your network, your community, your profession and a number of other factors, a higher percentage than you think may be there. (Statistics estimate between 11% and 20% of Internet users are frequent Twitter users. ) The point is, if your business contacts are on LinkedIn, and you are on Twitter, you want to follow your business contacts on Twitter.

First, you will need to log in to LinkedIn and install the Tweets Application. You will be able to access the application by clicking on More in the top navigation menu.

The applications functions to integrate your Twitter account with your LinkedIn profile. I don’t recommend using Twitter solely through your LinkedIn account, however, it is useful to find and follow your connections.

As you can see from the screenshot above, I am following 1,076 people on Twitter. Let’s look at how many of those are my LinkedIn contacts and if I’m missing following any of them on Twitter.

There are not, in fact, many people I’m not following from the list of my business contacts using Twitter. This tool lets me review who they are and quickly and easily follow those I’m missing.